They had just turned into Trinity when Corbett heard the whistle of the crossbow bolt flying by his head, between him and the King. One of the men-at-arms, walking alongside, dropped his spear and collapsed screaming and gurgling on the blood spurting out of his mouth. Corbett raised himself in the stirrups and yelled at the men-of-arms who ran forward: under Corbett’s and de Warrenne’s instructions, these circled the king, raising their shields to form a wall of iron around him. Corbett glanced quickly at the houses on either side.
‘There!’ Ranulf yelled.
Corbett followed his direction to the top-storey window of a tavern on the corner of an alleyway. He saw the casement and wooden shutter being pushed open again, a cowled figure lurking there and the thick snout of a crossbow. Again there was a whirr like a hawk falling to the kill, but this time the bolt smashed against one of the upraised shields.
‘Follow me!’ Corbett urged.
He dismounted, drew his sword and, with Ranulf and Maltote following behind, forced his way through the crowd, ignoring the chaos breaking out around them. They reached the shadows of the houses. Corbett looked up and cursed. He had lost his way. Then he saw the corner of the alleyway: a hooded beggar squatted there, hands extended. Corbett knocked him aside as he ran towards the entrance under a garish tavern sign swinging from its jutting pole. Yelling at Ranulf to go down the alleyway and guard the back entrance, Corbett entered the narrow, dark hallway. The people gathered there had no idea what was going on. Most of them were tapsters, scullions and maids. Corbett ordered them out of the way and ran up the narrow, shaky, wooden stairs. By now he was covered in sweat and had to grip the sword more tightly: he desperately wondered what he would do if he met the assailant. He tried to recall the window.
‘It’s at the top,’ he muttered to himself, and gingerly climbed the next flight of stairs. He was half-way up when he saw the smoke seeping out from under a doorway in a recess at the top of the stairs. He turned round.
‘Maltote!’ he ordered, ‘go back! Tell the taverner his house is on fire!’
Corbett, pinching his nostrils, tried the garret door. It was locked. He stepped back and kicked it open. Smoke curled and twisted, though most of this was pouring out of the open window. There was a chair just under the sill on which an arbalest lay, a collection of bolts beside it. On the floor next to this sprawled the corpse of a man blackened and burning. For a while Corbett could only stare, horrified by the eerie blue and yellow flames which danced over the blackening corpse.
‘God save us!’ Maltote muttered, coming up behind him. ‘Master, what kind of fire is that?’
Coughing and spluttering, Corbett broke from his reverie. He wrenched off a heavy curtain, tattered and holed, which hung on the back of the door and, urging Maltote to help, threw it over the burning corpse, dousing the flames. Others came up: the landlord and his helpers carrying pails of water. They threw these over the blanket and around the rest of the room. Corbett, however, noticed that, apart from some scorching, the fire had not caught either the walls or floorboards. At last the fire was doused. Nothing to show except the stench, scorch-marks, and a horrid sizzling as the water seeped through the curtain covering the corpse.
‘Clear the room!’ Corbett urged. ‘Maltote, get them all out!’
The landlord, a pot-bellied, balding fellow, began to protest as Ranulf burst into the room.
‘I saw no one!’ He gasped. ‘No one at all! What happened here?’
‘Clear the room!’ Corbett shouted. ‘You, sir-’ he pointed at the taverner ‘-wait for me below!’
Maltote and Ranulf shoved them from the room. Corbett pulled back the heavy curtain then gagged at the terrible stench. Maltote turned away to vomit on a pile of straw in the corner; Ranulf coolly squatted down beside the remains.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked, pointing to the crossbow and bolts on the stool.
‘I don’t know,’ Corbett replied. ‘Here we have a man full of life and malice. He takes a crossbow, shoots two bolts in an attempt to kill the king and then, a few minutes later, is a burning cadaver. He is consumed by a strange fire which does not spread to the walls or floorboards.’
‘It would have done,’ Ranulf retorted. ‘Eventually, the wood would have smouldered and then burst into flames. Our arrival here stopped it. The question is, who is he; and how did he die?’
Corbett forced himself to examine the corpse. The face and upper torso were all burnt. The eyes had turned to water. Any hair on scalp and face was now flakes of ash. Corbett swallowed hard.
‘Look.’ He pulled the blanket further down. ‘The top half of the body has been terribly burnt.’ He pointed to the hose and boots the man wore. ‘Yet these are only scorched.’
Corbett eased himself up and went across to the bed. A battered leather saddlebag lay pushed just under the dirt-stained bolster. Corbett pulled this out, cut the straps and emptied the contents on to the woollen coverlet: a Welsh stabbing dagger; a purse full of silver coins, and the soiled white surcoat of the Templar Order with its red cross on either side.
‘A wealthy man, at least for a soldier,’ Corbett observed.
He opened the neck of the purse and shook the coins into his hands. He put the silver on the bed and unrolled the scraps of parchment he’d also found. One was a very crude diagram which Corbett immediately recognised as a rough map of the road leading from Micklegate Bar up through Trinity. The other was a list of provisions bought by one Walter Murston, serjeant of the Templar manor at Framlingham. Corbett sat down on the bed.
‘Ranulf, put everything back into the saddlebag. For God’s sake,’ he waved at the blackened remains, ‘cover that. Here we have,’ he continued, ‘Walter Murston, a member of the Templar Order, who tried to commit treason and regicide. He fired two bolts at our king but then, in a matter of minutes, is consumed by a mysterious fire.’
‘God’s punishment,’ Maltote intoned.
‘If that was the case,’ Ranulf jibed, ‘most of York would burst into flames.’
Corbett got up and stared out of the window. The royal cavalcade was now on its way. The crowd was staring up at the tavern. A curtain of men-at-arms, shields locked together, lances out, now ringed the tavern. On the stairs outside there was a heavy footfall and a deep voice cursing every taverner as ‘fatherless, misbegotten spawns of Satan’. Corbett grinned.
‘My lord of Surrey is about to arrive,’ he murmured.
The chamber door crashed back on its leather hinges.
‘Poxy knaves! Ingrate bastards!’ de Warrenne shouted, his red face covered in sweat. He lumbered into the room like an old bear. ‘Well, Corbett, you bloody clerk! What do we have here?’ The earl pulled back the ragged coverlet and stared down at the corpse. ‘Fairies’ tits! Who’s he?’
‘Apparently a serjeant, probably an arbalester of the Temple Order,’ Corbett replied. ‘He came into this chamber with his crossbow and tried to slay our king.’
‘And who killed him?’
‘We were just debating that, my lord. Maltote thinks it was God, but Ranulf believes that if every sinner in York was to be so punished, the whole city would be a sea of fire.’